Open Book
by TheLarkAscending82
Summary: Just a little seed of an idea that turned itself into a fic when I thought of Jack and his love of literature and how he would read Phryne.


_**So, I was thinking about Jack the other day (as you do) and how we know he is a keen reader and my mind went off into a little world of its own (as it often does at the moment when MFMM is involved) and I thought of Phryne as a book for Jack... and well...this is what ended up on the page.**_

_**Again, thank you so much for the lovely reviews on my last post they really do mean a lot. And please, if you feel inclined, do let me know what you think to this one.**_

Her life was an open book but you'd be a fool to think you could read her. Hers was a mystery, a tragedy, a triumph and all things in between. To the outside world it would seem the pages could be read from cover to cover, open to your perusal...For the most part. However, there were chapters that remained firmly shut and prising those pages open was not an option, she held those chapters close to her chest. They consist of events and times that are just too painful to share and opening them up would be like opening a wound that had never fully healed. She would reveal them in her own time and to people of her choosing. These pages were filled with misplaced blame and a youth spent physically hungry for nourishment and for answers that came too late to be of any use to her... Why had she lost her? Why had she not notice her go? Had she called for her at the end? These were chapters that could never be closed for Phryne, but they could never be rewritten either, no matter how many times she imagined the scenario differently, only her beloved's epitaph could be redrafted but in the end the outcome was always the same anyway. These are the chapters that darkened her dreams to this day. Dreams that appear to her in hieroglyphs, sun kissed golden hair and piercing screams, screams that were mirrored by her own muffled cries upon waking.

He has studied her open pages from cover to cover. He always was a diligent student. It had always been an interesting read even before the golden gilt-edged pages were added shortly after the blood stained narrative of the war. The war; another of the chapters she rarely shares. He can't blame her for that, he carries his own ghosts from that time that he dares not give a voice to fearing they too will enter his dreams like the others. He knows she'll understand. She's been there. But he does know that if he were to share these men, these ghosts with anyone, it will be with her. She has experienced the war in close proximity; she too has had it enter her body through every human sense and had it take residence under her skin. She has felt the tremble of the ground from artillery fire so strong that it alters the very beat of your heart and the ringing in the ears that follows. She has faces of incomplete young men imprinted in her memory that can never be unseen and she too has had her hands stained with another's blood and had it dry under her fingernails as a lasting reminder.

Hers was a book he would never tire of reading; the spine of which was already marked by creases he had put there. It is a story that has surpassed anything he has read before. The heroine, her life so dense with story; a devastating loss married to a miraculous twist of fate. An untouchable dream awakened and made reality by the arbitrary hand of providence. He was always tempted to skip ahead a few pages, to know more of her. He wanted to be the person who was able to read her best, but he was no fool, that kind of knowing would come only from her own decision and not his want of it. And to skip ahead was to miss the present and it was in the present that he found he was privileged at times to learn parts of her past, to briefly glimpse upon the pages otherwise shut tight to all but herself and the very few, her most trusted. In her book as in her life the pages were written on both sides; the rapture of her present on one side and the privation of her youth on its reverse, and when seen in the right light the story on the other side, the side she tries to hide, could be glimpsed if you cared to take the time and look hard enough. He did.

It is from these glimpses he gains enlightenment to the structure of her Psyche. Psyche, as part of her trusted few he discovers that this was to be her given name had her father not been drunk on her christening day and failed to recollect it. He already knows that another drunken mistake was to inadvertently precipitate his second daughter's murder. Christ, how fragile life was in the wrong hands. If he is honest, where her father is involved there are some things of her he is scared to discover, will they sit as heavily on him as they do on her? For all her outward exultation and dauntless love of life there was also a disquiet that followed her soul. Distant figures causing long shadows. How could they not affect him? He loves her after all.

She filled her book full of characters; the diversity of those characters was testament to her strange gravitational pull. She played many of them herself. Mother; to her own unending surprise. Seductress; she would happily admit to that one, and everything in between from your best friend to your worst enemy. Would he feature in her future? Become one of the recurring characters? He knew that he would, how could he not? He had incrementally managed to work his way into her life, his place in her story had grown from side note, to paragraph, to chapter. In time, their separate pages, individually delicate and as vulnerable to tearing as the last would be closed together, bound and strong. He knew this because he knew he was well beyond the point of being able to give her up. He had tried that once before, to close the book on her, but in doing so had made his own story one of self induced misery. Until of course she forced her way into its pages again. She never was one to take no for an answer. He knew that both of their stories would likely go in directions that neither of them had ever previously imagined possible for themselves or even desired prior to having met. He knew it wouldn't be easy but like she said, nothing that matters is easy.

_**Notes: For those of you who have not read any of the MFMM books you will not know that it is mentioned in the first book that it was intended for her to be named Psyche. I think it would have suited her but perhaps not quite so well as Phryne does : )**_


End file.
